Snitches Get Stitches

What’s a Twitter beef when you have the camps of two superstars like Chris Brown and Drake ready to go to battle for their boys? Wednesday night’s brawl in NYC that resulted in Brown’s chin gash, his security guard’s head cut, an innocent bystander hospitalized and a bunch of broken glass is turning out to be one huge messy headache. As details continue to unfold, Drake maintains his innocence claiming he was on his way out of the club when the fight broke loose. Meanwhile, TMZ reports Chris Brown is talking with New York Police Department detectives about the incident. Due to the physical evidence Brown has he very well may have a case against Drizzy Drake. Brown’s attorney, Mark Geragos, presented evidence to the NYPD Thursday night that Meek Mill and Drake were the aggressors. But Brown released Meek Mill of any wrongdoing with a tweet that has since been deleted from Brown’s timeline. According to TMZ, Brown spoke with detectives in an undisclosed location on Thursday. And now the snitching accusations have begun.

A quick search of “Chris Brown snitch” on Twitter yields a range of responses from “Chris Brown Is A Snitch: If I learned anything from The Wire it’s don’t be snitchin’” to “So not only is Chris Brown a woman beater, he’s a snitch too? Yo can we be done w this cat already?” Sigh freaking sigh. The “snitch” label is not surprising considering the “Stop Snitching” campaign that has been popularized by hip-hop. It’s street code ethics. But not really.

Although the media oftentimes inaccurately portrays the “stop snitching” mantra as a code in the black community that protects criminals, it’s a bit more complex. More than anything the anti-snitch notion hails from blacks long turbulent history and rightful mistrust of the police. It’s not that people simply want to protect criminals, it’s moreso that certain communities feel the police cannot protect them and aiding police may be their death sentence.

That begs the question: is Chris Brown a snitch? No, no and no again. Based on the facts—a bottle was thrown by someone in Drake’s entourage and Chris Brown was hit in the chin with said bottle— we can gather Brown was assaulted resulting in an injury. When normal, rationale people are assaulted they tend to call the police and file a police report. It’s really that simple. For those that believe he’s breaking some type of code, what would you have him do? Certainly people don’t believe two rich superstars should take matters in their own hands and perpetuate more violence, right? Right?